


Winter Lady

by Sossity



Category: due South
Genre: Canada, Introspection, M/M, Post-Canon, Wordcount: 100-1.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-20
Updated: 2011-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-27 14:12:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/296701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sossity/pseuds/Sossity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life is different these days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Winter Lady

Stella sits in front of her fireplace, paperwork surrounding her in a circle and her bare feet nearly touching the hearth. She brushes her hair behind her ear and holds a deposition up to better catch the light. The cases are a lot different these days. Poor kids with nowhere to turn for help, mostly. A few bigger ones she'll actually get paid for. And that dam thing, but even she'd admit that she has no chance in hell of getting reparations for even one person, let alone for the masses of people displaced or for the environmental damage. It keeps her mind busy, even when she's not working on other cases, or learning some new aspect of tribal law.

She's still not sure what she was thinking. _If_ she was thinking. To run up here when her second marriage crashed and burned, back to her first Ray? Sheer romantic nonsense. As far as she knows, he and Fraser are perfectly happy wherever they're living now. Just as well that she came to her senses in Whitehorse and stopped there. She was embarrassed to have even gotten on the plane in the first place. But if she hadn't...

They needed her here. She needed to _be_ here.

She's wearing a sweater and long johns. Her old suits and dresses are boxed up in the corner of the bedroom closet, to be brought out in the few meetings or cases where she has to deal with someone from one of the big cities. People like that, she's learned over her life, are only impressed by the fashionable and the expensive and she has no time for that any more. People here respect you if you can take care of yourself, if you can hold your own against Nature at her strongest, and that's all she needs.

She saw Fraser in court, once, a couple of years ago. He was in town on police business. He had no idea she was here. Obviously. She didn't avoid him, this was her home as well now, she just nodded and presented her case as best as she could.

They went out for lunch at recess. He had laugh lines around his eyes now and his hair was turning gray at the edges. She had no doubt these were both Ray's fault.

She was surprised to find a decent person hidden somewhere under the starch, someone who cared deeply for the land and the people he took care of. She hoped, in a way, that he could see the same in her. She could tell, though, from the wariness he presented, that she would always be foremost his husband's ex-wife.

She left them alone. She never tried to contact Ray; not during that first stupid trip where she bawled her eyes out in the airport bathroom and bought that one newspaper with that discrimination suit splattered all over the headlines, not back in Florida when she read every book and court case she could find on the Inuit people and wished she'd paid better attention to the expert when he was around, and not even much later, when she could have used about twelve extra hands helping her fight her way through immigration. Not even when she heard from Ray's mother about the engagement and, later, the marriage.

No, even after that lunch, she let the past be.

It was a completely unexpected pleasure, then, to receive a card from them that Christmas.

She stands up, legs stiff and aching, and pads into the kitchen for more coffee. She'll be glad to see the sun again. Her first winter was her hardest. But even after all these years, she still finds herself getting maudlin, occasionally; wondering where she would have ended up if things had been different, if either of her marriages worked out. Not that she would trade this for the world, of course, and she'll greet it, as she always does, at the kitchen window with a mug of coffee, a grin, and a wild cheer.


End file.
